PowerWells

Queensland-based social entrepreneurs Bradley Clair and Nicholas Kamols founded PowerWells in 2017 after attending a Startup Weekend at Substation33: a social enterprise and innovation lab.

UQ alumnus in Business Management Bradley and town planner Nicholas will both graduate from the University’s ilab accelerator program in July 2019. The program, part of UQ Ventures, provides $20,000 in funding to help startups fast track their startups from ideas to market-ready enterprises.

The social enterprise provides electric light and mobile phone charging to people in remote communities.

PowerWells won the Get Started category at the Startup Weekend and set an ambitious goal of delivering the product to a remote Indonesian community within the fortnight.

Bradley and Nicholas answer some questions on how PowerWells works, and what they hope to achieve.

How did you get the idea for PowerWells?

The idea to upcycle old batteries came to us at the Startup Weekend, held at Substation 33 in Logan, Queensland.

We had the opportunity to chat with someone from a remote community in Indonesia about how difficult it was to charge a phone and the impact of having a charged phone – both economically and educationally.

With our experience recycling electronic waste and building solar powered energy systems, we hacked together a prototype over one weekend.

The following week we finalised a design and, within nine days, we raised enough money from not-for-profit YFS and flew to Jakarta.

We had five days to build and install a PowerWell in a remote village without access to electricity.

We sourced the required electronic waste from secondhand junk shops, built a PowerWell in our hotel room, and drove 10 hours until we came across a village without any power.

For us, this experience validated our idea that there are many remote communities that would benefit from this kind of service.

Why are PowerWells important?

More than one billion people lack access to electricity. Our solution is to use the growing resource of electronic waste to change this.

In Australia, only two per cent of lithium-ion batteries are recycled. Instead of allowing these batteries to go into landfill, our mission is to provide basic power to people living without electricity.

To do this, we're providing small solar systems to a leader in the community who manages the system and provides charging for multiple households. The households then pay off the system in micropayments.

Thousands of remote communities across Papua New Guinea, Papua, West Papua, the rest of Indonesia and Pacific Island countries do not have a reliable source of electricity.

It is common for these people to travel many hours to charge mobile phones and spend large portions of their incomes on kerosene, small batteries and candles.

We are currently rolling out the first 100 systems to people living in remote Indonesian communities.

Each system will last in excess of five years in the field, and PowerWells is committed to recovering all of the systems at the end of their usable life.

One of the main impacts of each system is that it replaces six or more kerosene lamps, which are a large ongoing cost to the households, have terrible impacts on people’s respiratory health and contribute to air pollution.